business value & ICT - Telecommunications - Green IT - Orange Business Live blog

As 2009 winds down, most enterprises who follow the standard calendar fiscal year, are typically in budget planning mode if not already finished for 2010 spend. 

Indeed, we have seen some hestitation or delay in some investments this year.  A more popular request of late is that enterprises are requesting more OPEX based services rather than adding CAPEX to their end of year bottom lines.  WAN optimization remains a technology area still in demand given the changes of focus on consolidation and virtualization, which are common areas for quicker cost reduction around IT but where maintaining performance remains a challenge. 

• Keep users informed. Provide advance warning of scheduled downtime or planned maintenance, including projects undertaken outside of working hours, and with regular updates on unforeseen problems. This will reduce the number of calls made to tech support, enabling IT staff to focus on projects in hand or on rectifying problems, which is a more effective use of resources.

• Outsource some (or all) technical support tasks. This provides obvious benefits, including the flexibility to add extra support when needed, without having the costs incurred by additional staff during quiet periods. It can also reduce overtime costs for in-house staff, by spreading the IT support load over a larger number of workers.

• Invest in regular maintenance. Regular checks such as updating anti-virus definitions, performing back-ups, and applying hotfixes and software patches has an impact in terms of time and money during the short-term, but can protect against future issues which would incur far greater costs in terms of problem resolution.

• And, finally, take advantage of automated tasks. Adding an IT FAQs section to the corporate intranet, addressing some of the most commonly raised problems, can save IT staff a significant amount of time which would otherwise be spent rectifying routine issues problems, for example resetting passwords.

Interesting keynote from Mike Cansfield, principal analyst at Forrester Research, to kick off this years Orange Business Live. Mike reckons that all companies should now be focussed on planning their way out of the recession (and yes, it is a recession, not a depression as the doom mongers are proclaiming.) Not all sectors and all markets are recessed, so look for areas of growth, he says such as Africa, Middle East and China.

It's also vital to review the underlying cost structures pervading the whole business and recognise how new technologies like Cloud Computing, SaaS, M2M, telepresence, can strip out costs that companies have so far overlooked. For instance, to reduce travel costs, you could use more conferencing and collaboration technologies. To reduce mobile bills, you can look to FMC and getting mobile traffic onto global VPNs as soon as possible.

Cansfield recommends that companies do more to automate and integrate their supply chains upwards and downwards. And supply chains are also the answer to innovation too - work with your partners to develop new products, go-to-market strategies and figure out ways to dramatically remove costs from processes. "A company is only as strong as its ecosystem."

It's all pretty simple stuff but according to Cansfield this was overlooked during the growth years, with chief execs so focussed on sales and the top line that they neglected the bottom line. So the message is: use the downturn to review and revise all processes. Let the problems lead (or solutions to them) and let the technology follow.

A report published by Ovum earlier this summer found that businesses are still struggling to deliver decent application performance over their network. The analyst spoke to senior IT professionals in 150 large enterprises in Europe and the US about how their WAN is coping with the ever-greater demands from applications. It found that the vast majority were starting to look to their network service provider for application optimization services.

The report was sponsored by Ipanema and the top-level findings are in its press release. Although 78% of respondents admitted that poorly performing networked applications would have a serious impact on their business, less than half of them had confidence in their tools to maintain high performance. According to author of the report and Ovum principal analyst Peter Hall, “these results suggest that the current approach has some significant limitations.”

In face of the increasing complexity of application acceleration technology and tools, between 65% and 80% of respondents were considering out-tasking application optimization to their network service provider. Areas they felt service providers could contribute most were in: guaranteeing the performance of business-critical applications and acceleration technologies to reduce bandwidth usage and delays. The full report can be downloaded after registration via Ipanema from here.